Building Digital Assistants and Bots: A Vendor Guide and Market Analysis

400-page report covers 274 vendors and 129 case studies.

AI World and AI Trends, have teamed up with TMA Associates to publish “Building Digital Assistants and Bots: A Vendor Guide and Market Analysis”, a definitive reference to companies supporting building digital assistants. Price – US$999.

There is help navigating this complexity. AI World and AI Trends, have teamed up with TMA Associates to publish “Building Digital Assistants and Bots: A Vendor Guide and Market Analysis”, a definitive reference to companies supporting the development of digital assistants. The guide can save you months of research, and help make choices that best support your goals. It is intended as a reference, with summary tables and lists that help you quickly find the resources that best meet your needs, along with discussions of the focus and strengths of 274 companies and their products.

The report includes a comprehensive Digital Assistant market introduction, defining terms and deciphering the jargon of natural language interpretation technology, and focuses on what you need to understand in order to make your solution fully serve your customers or employees. It describes the various options in approaching in the development of a digital assistant, and how those options relate to your choice of vendors. It addresses the differences in channels, from chatbots to Alexa skills to conversational customer service calls and more. It also includes a section describing 129 deployed digital assistants, illustrating current uses of the technology.

Why you need to buy this report

Billions of dollars in investments are now being made into developing a new generation of Digital Assistants that can interface with your clients, prospects and employee with a natural language interface. These digital assistant and bot technologies are increasingly the new connection to companies, applications, and services.

Deep-pocketed companies are driving this trend with the proliferation of “personal assistants” that are increasingly an alternative to web search, providing answers rather than lists of websites. These initiatives are teaching your customers that a user interface that simply says “type or say what you want” is a real possibility. The trend is driven in part by the classical Graphical User Interface being over-burdened by too many options, particularly on the smaller screens of smartphones.

Customers will prefer companies that provide this friendly connection. They will want to be able to reach you by texting from messaging services. They will want to be able to talk to your company on home devices. They will want to be able to reach you through the general personal assistants. They will want to chat with you from your website or an app on their mobile phone. And you will eventually want an independent branded digital assistant that is a customer service, technical support, marketing, and sales channel. Not only do these channels provide an always-available connection to your customers, they avoid many costly contacts requiring agent support.

Do you need a research project to address this trend? No! There are resources that help you develop and deploy digital assistants and natural-language interfaces. Vendors can help you with specialized targets such as messaging bots or more general development that can support deployment across many channels. In fact, there are an increasing number of options, as the coverage in the Building Digital Assistants and Bots shows.

Let our Digital Assistant and Bot Vendor Guide be your map to success as you become part of this critical AI trend.

Report Benefits

The report introduces the area by defining terms and reducing the mystery of natural language interpretation technology, focusing on what you need to understand to make your solution fully serve your customers or employees. It describes options in approaching the task of creating a digital assistant, and how those options relate to your choice of vendors. It includes a brief description of more than 100 deployed digital assistants, illustrating current uses of the technology.

In summary, the report details:

Why developing a digital assistant strategy is rapidly becoming as essential as having a web site

The state of the underlying technologies of natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition, and what is driving recent progress

Options in developing digital assistants, ranging from deep involvement to engaging a vendor that will do most of the work

Categories of vendors, from those providing solutions supporting full digital assistants to those providing components you can use to assemble one

Specific discussions of the offerings of 270 companies that can provide these resources by an independent analyst, in clear terms, covering 280 pages

Summary tables and lists for quick navigation of the report as a reference

Web sites to follow up with the companies that interest you

How you can take advantage of the specialized nature of your digital assistant

Descriptions of 129 deployed digital assistants

Building bots and digital assistants that are reached through the general personal assistants and messaging services

Building independent digital assistants that can reach customers directly

Cross-platform synergies—developing core NLP that can be deployed through multiple channels without repeating development

William Meisel, Ph.D., president, TMA Associates, is publisher and editor of the monthly paid-subscription, no-ads newsletter LUI News (covering commercial applications of the Language User Interface), leader of the workshop on Building an Application-Specific Intelligent Assistant at the upcoming AI World Conference, organizer of the Conversational Interaction Conference. His experience in language technology includes founding and running a speech recognition company, technical papers on neural networks, a technical book on machine learning, books on the voice user interface, and eleven patents in the area. His monthly in-depth coverage of companies in the area of this report and his deep understanding of the underlying technology (and its strengths and weaknesses) make this report one of a kind.